photo ops

I am dreadful at taking pictures, whether with a digital camera, a phone, an iPad, a whatever. I can't recall whether earlier generations of technology afforded me better phot-op success. That Kodak Brownie Starflash: did it make me a better photographer? Maybe. (What a gorgeous memory of the flashbulb brightening, hot, then cooling into a star-cooled sculpture of immediacy.) I can't quite figure out what makes me such a poor photographer. I have discernment and scale and compositional talent with words, but visual artifacts? Not so much. 

land of the 'free,' home of the loud

When did every medical / surgical waiting room come equipped with a blaring television? Obviously, it was not always the case. In the Forties, Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, and maybe Eighties, it's not as if waiting rooms had radios to distract and divert us. What did people do? Read? Fidget? Pray? Converse? But starting -- when? -- in the Nineties or Oughties, televisions became ubiquitous in waiting rooms, as well as in a plethora of public places (supermarkets, barber shops, brothels, broth houses, sports bars, cafes, bistros, restaurants, fast-food joints, wedding chapels, betting parlors, electronics departments in mega-stores, corner stores, bodegas, salons, confessionals, opium dens). Televisions showing exactly what? Blather, folderol, pablum, static, chatter. Recipes, DIY, so-called news, energetic nihilism. Stories of triumph and optimism. America's great product: homegrown cheeriness blanketing doom. (You hear people use the phrase, "a disease of denial." But isn't all disease of denial? Go further, MadAvenue is built squarely on the bedrock premise of denying the Biggest D of All, the unmentionable and unspeakable closure of all closures.) So, today I paced a waiting room, an expectant father awaiting surgical news (all went well), searching for the never-to-be-found remote, tempted to tell the reception desk person to shut it all off, wishing If I Had a Hammer. What would Thoreau do? (WWTD?)

applause

I heard and watched repeated rounds of applause this evening at a senior sports banquet. I myself applauded frequently as a proud parent. Applause. We are told the word derives from Latin, meaning the beating of wings, an angelic image if you accept the wings-on-angels premise as depicted in medieval art. (Or was it Renaissance art? Or both?) Applause, the repeated joining of hands in praise. Granted, it can get tiresome after forty or fifty times. Is it not true that you can tell if someone is righty or lefty just by watching them clap? I'm lefty. My left hand claps onto my right. What would an ambidextrous person do? Clap like one of those wind-up chimps that was a toy in the Fifties? Doubt it. When did humans first applaud? Have they ever clapped feet instead of hands? Or anything else? If aliens appeared, how would we explain this habit? Do some cultures clap louder, or softer, than others? What are aural or oral or verbal equivalents of applause? Hoot-hoots more than grunts, right?

selfies, belfies, and soulfies

One of the great virtues of American English is that it has served as a lovely, anarchic breeding ground for new words, for all sorts of coinages and neologisms. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of slang. We're not like the French, waiting for an academy to grant approval to our local, handcrafted, artisanal, non-GMO, and ferociously democratic wordsmithing.

"Selfie" is but one example, illustrating the modern solipsistic passion for pictures of one's self, or of one's orbit of selfdom. By extension, the New York Times tells us this week, "belfies" are self-administered photos of one's behind. Posterior selfies. Who knew? (Not me.)

Which gets me thinking. Try these on for size. And feel free to chime in with your own inventions.

soulfies -- Snapshots of the current state of your soul.

barfies -- Instagrams of pub crawling. Can be used for calling in sick the next day.

aarfies -- Adorable dog images.

rolfies -- Photos of successful holistic soft-tissue release. (Cf. rolfing. Replaces old-fashioned smiley-face emoji.)

nullfies -- Blanks. Nothing. Zilch. Nothing on the screen, but takes up memory anyway. (A sly comment on nihilism. Then again, maybe not.)

oughties -- The pictures you really should have displayed, instead of the ones you regrettably did display.

Your turn, dear reader.


 

a tree, a nest, and a pool

In an ancient rite of excommunication, a bell, a book, and a candle were employed. A 1958 movie starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, with Jack Lemmon and Ernie Kovacs, borrows those words for the title, "Bell, Book and Candle." (I wish they had used the serial comma.) Today, on Tipperary Hill, I saw a Christmas tree with needles the color of copper (a hue not unlike my dog's hair) by the sidewalk (yikes! keeping a tree till Pentecost?!), a tiny bird's nest (sans bird's eggs) on the sidewalk a block away from the discarded Yule tree, and the swimming pool in Burnet Park filled with unnameable swimming-pool-azure water but absent of swimmers.

What, if anything, are we to make of these signs?

I do not know.

not a cloud in the sky

Wind has scrubbed the sky clear of all those cirrus, cirrocumulus, altocumulus, cumulonimbus, and cumulus clouds floating by this morning. At least from what I can see, they've gone elsewhere. Or disappeared. (Which is it?). And my vantage point is limited. (Isn't everyone's vantage point limited?) I am sitting at Cafe Kubal in downtown Syracuse, facing Jefferson Street, with South Salina Street to my left. The only sky afforded my perusing is above buildings, not that we have skyscrapers like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, or Moscow, Idaho. One or two structures as high as, say, twenty stories. (I am choosing not to spell "storeys.") "Not a cloud in the sky." Here. Now. And as discerned in my angle of vision. Make of that what you will, you metaphoreans.

bumps in the road

Have you seen it? A car swerves to avoid a slightly raised manhole or a pothole or a bump in the road. Actually, it is not typically a bump but rather a depression, a recess, an emptiness where asphalt or concrete should be and once was. More accurately, the car does not swerve by itself. The driver swerves it to avoid the offending disturbance. I've done it. Haven't you? Why do we do this? To save wear and tear on our tires? To achieve a less-rocky ride, avoiding In-Vehicle Beverage Spillage (IVBS) or CD skippage? Do we perform this evasive driving maneuver to keep the driver from losing his or her train of thought? (Maybe it should be "car of thought" in this case.)

Can you as a reader apply any metaphorical value to this phenomenon? 

Comments invited.